New FCC regulations would prevent ISPs from blocking or slowing bandwidth-hogging Web traffic such as streaming video or other applications that put a strain on their networks or from charging different rates to users.
A GOP bill sponsored by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has Republicans paiting Net Neutrality as a government takeover of the Internet.
McCain’s bill, the Internet Freedom Act, would block the Federal Communications Commission from making Net neutrality the law of the land. The rule preventing ISPs from slowing down certain types of content would create “onerous federal regulation,” McCain argued in a written statement.
This is a huge debate that pits pre-Internet phone companies and cable providers like AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) who have built out their telecommunications systems against new Internet content players—many based in California like Google (NasdaqGS: GOOG), Amazon (NasdaqGS: AMZN), and others—that want to clog up thos pipes with their content for free.
The debate even effects Apple’s (NasdaqGS: AAPL) decision on whether to allow certain apps like Vonage (NYSE: VG) or Google Voice to operate on its iPhones. Sure, Apple is trying to protect its monopoly, but the iPhone’s ties to AT&T make it a player in the debate.
Google and others argue that AT&T and others should not discriminate against Internet content companies like Hulu.com or YouTube (which now has more people watching clips than Google searches) from using the delivery systems the Telcos built and “own.”
The Telcos and ISPs say their costs for building, maintaining and delivering the high speed tubes to the doors of its customers forces them to throttle certain uses. Regulations that would let content providers use their networks freely, jamming up some Verizon network with Hulu reruns of the Flntstones for example, could be ruinous.
Think for example of the way cable works, where content providers like Disney or ESPN (same thing), negotiate with cable companies to carry sports or High School Musical 18, or other programming into your home. You then pay your subscription fee to the DIsh, or Comcast, or Astound (thank you), which gets distributed dime by dime back to those content providers.
But on the Internet, where Google searches are free, and watching YouTube is free, or downloading from iTunes is between you and Apple, with no consideration whatsoever for the “to-the-door” connection!
Somebody’s ox is getting gored, and it isn’t Google’s!
